Thursday, June 30

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Daily News Stuff 30 June 2022

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  • TSMC  to customers: Get with the program and move to 28nm already.  (AnandTech)

    Compared to the new hotness (see below) 28nm is old school and almost old hat, but it works, and it works the same as older processes.  It's the last robust process with planar transistors rather than FinFETs, so designs are relatively easy to move.

    There is also a 20nm planar node, but it sucks.  AMD never used it, for example, despite being stuck on 28nm for years.


  • Samsung meanwhile has started production at 3nm.  (ZDNet)

    The main advantage of Samsung's 3nm and their new GAAFET transistors is that they cut power consumption by nearly half.  They also reportedly offer up to 20% better performance but the way that number is measured makes its utility dubious.  You need the chart plotting frequencies against power consumption and the details of the sample circuit being evaluated.

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Disclaimer: Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, strike me a light, I'm in a plight.  Matchmaker, matchmaker, lend me your fire, my need for a smoke is dire.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:02 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 290 words, total size 3 kb.

1 Or to rephrase TSMC: Hey customers, spend a whole lot of time and money updating and re-validating for a different process so we can make more money.
Seriously, the cost-benefit analysis for the customers isn't there or they would have done so already.  The benefit is mainly on the TSMC side.  What TSMC should do is create a spin-off in partnership with the customers and transition all the old equipment and facilities for the old processes.  It will eventually wear out and upgrades will have to happen, but if the customers have an ownership stake in it it will change the cost-benefit analysis quite a bit.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, June 30 2022 09:06 PM (F3K2c)

2 I was wondering what node the Pi Pico uses.  Most of STM's STM32 line of Arm Cortex-M processors are 40-130nm.  Their H7 series (Cortex M7 with FPU) are 40nm and run up to 480MHz.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 02 2022 12:12 AM (/tDCi)

3 Yeah, 40nm is still very popular for microcontrollers.  Cheap enough and fast enough.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, July 02 2022 12:34 AM (PiXy!)

4 Had a discussion a couple of months ago about car ECUs and the like.  A node shrink would probably require extensive revalidations.  You wouldn't like the consequences if one of those fails.

Had to move my car keys to a new fob case recently.  The chip in there is an NXP Cortex M0 with some crypto functionality.  Probably on an old node, too.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, July 02 2022 09:56 AM (/tDCi)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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